State of Art of the Effectiveness in Adopting Blockchain Technology - UAE Survey Study

The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating Blockchain (BC) technology among its services to the public. In April 2018, the UAE government launched a Blockchain Strategy of 2021. Under this initiative, 50 percent of government transactions will be processed over a BC platform. Eleven billion dirhams are expected to be saved in transactions and documents prepared in the government sector. The UAE 2021 strategy includes four pillars, focusing on residence happiness, government efficiency, advanced legislation, and global entrepreneurship. In October 2016, the emirate of Dubai, launched a local BC strategy to become the first energy-powered city that leads the future economy by 2020. This motivation placed the Government of UAE as a unique and pioneered country in innovation and enabling the ecosystem to be addressed in both the public and private sectors. This strategy is based on three domains: government effectiveness, industry innovation, and international, domestic leadership. BC projects will be experimenting throughout the country in many sectors such as energy, transportation, logistics, tourism, health, education and employment, economic development, safety and justice, social services, municipal and land works. This paper study the state of art of the UAE strategy towards adopting BC technology among all its entities. A survey has been conducted to evaluate the strategic effectiveness of this new technology. The study involves a combination of 71 public and private companies that operate in the UAE. The outcome shows that there is a need to integrate this technology. At the same time, the survey concluded that 92.0% of the companies are aware of the technology. It also highlighted that 55% of companies suffer from the lack of experienced consultants and outsources their services. The survey confirmed that BC technology had been used in different industrial use cases such as supply chain (35%), Internet of things (27
^%
), and financial transactions (25
^%
).